The Best Articles of the Year: Fashion

From 1960s Korea, through Brazil, to today’s Los Angeles: Inside the world that brought you Forever 21—and those skinny jeans in your closet. Over the past 15 years, the fashion industry has undergone a profound and baffling transformation.

Shirod Ince sat at the front of a line of more than 100 people, mostly guys in their early 20s, on a Friday evening last month. For two days, he and his friends had been taking turns waiting outside a Foot Locker in Harlem to buy the new LeBron sneaker.

The email Tatia Pilieva sent to 21 people Monday morning started off the way such notes usually do when someone wants to get a link on Facebook. “Hey my dears,” Ms. Pilieva wrote. “I wanted to share our little film with you.”

When Christopher Tennant, the editor of the magazine Man of the World, met up with his future in-laws a few months ago at JoJo, an Upper East Side restaurant, he wore a navy blazer from Barneys New York, olive slacks and — what else? — a pair of sneakers by Common Projects.

For a time, starting in the early 1990s, Isabella Blow and Alexander McQueen were inseparable—fashion muse and master—lovers without the sex. They shared something else: a self-loathing so intense it would devour them both, with Blow’s suicide in 2007 and McQueen’s in 2010.

In the Dries Van Noten exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris is a video that stitches together sequences from 20 years of his runway shows — a “supercut,” in online argot. On a tour of the show not long ago, Mr.

BERKELEY, Calif. — IN the Bay Area, the last week of school is a time to dig out cozy jackets and socks, but this year our natural air-conditioning (that’s “fog” to you) failed, giving us a few sweltering June days.